


Ports of Refuge

by superdeath



Series: Every Man, An Island [2]
Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Families of Choice, Gen, Mentor/Protégé, Minor Injuries, Samuel Drake (mentioned) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 16:36:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16288082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superdeath/pseuds/superdeath
Summary: "He can see flashes of it in the way Nate moves, climbing up waterspouts and across ledges. In that practiced way which speaks of having watched somebody else do it first. Many, many times."Part of a series exploring Nate and Sully's early partnership, and how they continue to learn the oceans of the other.





	Ports of Refuge

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't sure if I wanted to add this as a second chapter to my first fic, so I've made it a series instead.

Nate’s leaving. Sully can see it in the way Nate keeps his bags packed under the cot they’d set up in the cabin. He can see it in the constant glances outside the fogged window, at how Nate’s gaze passes the flickering wall of slight snowfall and focuses beyond the jagged Fir tree horizon.

Nate thinks he’s being discreet, but the kid hasn’t quite mastered the art of the Irish exit. 

Then again, Sully hasn’t demonstrated it to him yet.

Nate blinks, mind returning from whatever faraway land he was lost in, and Sully goes back to poking into the fireplace as if he hadn’t just been studying the boy’s profile. 

“I’m going outside for a bit,” Nate says, tying up his snow boots and making his way to the front door. 

Sully can hear the slight limp breaking the rhythm of his footsteps.

“Hm,” He grunts in response, listening to the boy push open the thick wooden door, a rush of cold air accompanying the wood scraping hoarsely against the floorboards.

Once the door creaks shut again, Sully wanders over to his own knapsack and begins to dig around the winter clothes he’d packed in a hurry, little time between their previous destination and this job.

The days are short in Denmark at this time of year, and the cold is bone deep, but Sully likes the change of pace from the dripping, humid heat of Costa Rica they left behind. 

But mostly he’s glad to be away from the shit show that happened there, and the uncomfortable reminder that he can’t let Nate into one side of this life while protecting him from the other. 

It was no small miracle that it took this long and so many jobs before the two of them had found themselves in a shoot out. 

Granted, Sully had been particularly careful deciding on which jobs to take Nate with him. But you can only bet against the house so many times, and the house is full of backstabbing assholes.

Sully killed three men from behind the cover of a flipped table in the seedy cantina they had cornered themselves in (stupid), as Nate huddled wide-eyed behind the bar, surrounded by broken glass and spilled liquor. His eyes locked on Sully as the back of his pant leg slowly turned red from the blood seeping from (what they’d find out to be, afterwards – in the sallow overhead light and the Pollock blood dripped tiles of yet another dingy bathroom) a bullet graze deep across the back of Nate’s knee.

Sully holds what he had rummaged around his luggage for, and watches Nate kick around the snow outside of the small cabin they are holed up in. 

In a few days they’ll be meeting up with a client about Viking gold or something similar. 

The news had broken through Nate’s distracted fugue state. The idea of possibly exploring damp labyrinthine sea caves following the path of Ivar the Boneless lighting up his eyes before it turned out to be yet another middleman type of job.

Which is quite alright with Sully. But there’s a drive in Nate for this life that has nothing to do with getting paid. And Sully finds himself feeling a little guilty disappointing the kid.

Which really is the long and short of it. He’s been living in a fantasy land, one he knows deep-down he created especially for Nate. An extra bit of work to keep that crest-fallen slump away every time they are hired to hand off cash, to grab an heirloom from a repossessed storage unit, to steal what has already been stolen. 

If Sully had anything he could actually teach the kid, it was that every dream is paid for in blood and gunpowder – in the right bribe, the right words, and the right getaway car. 

He couldn’t keep trying to save Nate from this truth. Not if he was going to treat him like an equal. He had promised the boy at least that, hadn’t he?

With that thought, Sully slowly finishes loading the bullets into the spare pistol he’d grabbed off one of the Costa Rican thugs he’d shot dead a week before, and heads outside.

—

Nate has his back to him, again staring far out into the dark, pine-sweet scented forest, but turns when he hears Sully clear his throat.

Sully hands out the gun expectantly, “It’s about time we practiced with one of these.”

Nate’s focus centers on the weapon in Sully’s grip, with the same attention and wariness as when he’d stumbled upon a poisonous snake.

It reminds the older man of the only time he’s seen the kid with a gun in hand, back on that rooftop in Cartagena. The unsteady and dangerously hesitant way he pointed it at one of Marlowe’s men.

The memory of Cartagena, the vivid hunted look in the boy’s face that prompted Sully to lift his own gun and pull the trigger. The moment Sully decided to terminate Marlowe’s contract with blood – maybe the first betrayal that landed him on the losing team – prompts Sully to try and say something, “It’s alright to —”

“I know it’s alright,” Nate snaps, stepping forward and reaching for the gun, “It’s just Sam usually — ”

Nate shuts up immediately, eyes darting up to see if somehow Sully hadn't heard his slip of tongue. 

As if Sully hadn’t already gathered there was something grounding Nate like an anchor tied around his ankle. A friend, an evil stepmother, a goddamn pet – he’s heard them all from colleagues and clients over the years. 

He can see flashes of it in the way Nate moves, climbing up waterspouts and across ledges. In that practiced way which speaks of having watched somebody else do it first. Many, many times. 

Sully knows the parts of Nate which aren’t the cherry-picked Sully mannerisms he’s gathered over the past couple years are the territory of somebody who got there before him.

They both have pretended Nate wasn’t aware of Sully graciously letting him keep his little secrets because, Hell, Sully had decades to accumulate his own. 

But maybe it’s due to Sully knowing that Nate is planning to ditch him, and that if there is one more thing he can teach the kid to keep him from dying in a gunfight before he leaves, this is the time to finally confront Nate about it.

“Who?” Sully asks, lifting the gun out of the way of Nate’s stalled grab.

It’s that narrow eyed, analytical stare again, but Sully refuses to be distracted by it, instead unloading the pistol and tucking it into the back of his belt loop. A jolt of cold shivers up his spine at the press of chilled metal seeping all the way through his thick shirt to his tailbone.

Although Nate has become more likely nowadays to deflect by saying lots of nothing (Sully feels partially responsible for that), sometimes he’ll revert back to the steel-walled silences characteristic of when they first met. Sully takes this silence as a cue to get out of the snow and back inside, to light a cigar by the fireplace and let Nate make his own decisions. 

He’s startled out of his thoughts when a cold thump of white suddenly explodes against his shoulder, and he sputters, shocked.

“What the hell are — ”

“How about this?” Nate smirks at him, having dashed a good ten feet away and already priming another snowball in his hands, “You hit me once with a snowball and I tell you who Sam is.”

Swiping a hand across his face, Sully lets out a surprised chuckle, “Snowballs aren’t gonna stop bullets, kid.”

His glib response is met with another snowball to the chest, and he kneels down immediately gathering as much snow as possible, “Fine! Have it your way!”

—

“I give up! I surrender,” Sully moans, before dropping spreadeagled into the soft snow behind him. He can track Nate’s giddy loping run with the crackle of ice under the boy’s boots, and soon Nate collapses next to him, laughing breathlessly.

“I win!” Nate crows, “What do I get?”

“Hey,” Sully coughs a bit, his heart still racing, and he begins to pat the front of his jacket for his cigar case, “I don’t recall having anything on the table.”

“That’s OK,” a small moment passes in which Nate seems to make a decision, “I’ll collect my winnings later.”

“It won’t be like last time,” Sully responds. A yellow dipped memory of Nate, dirty and smug with Sully’s wallet in that narrow Cartagena alleyway, drips warmly between them.

They watch the orange creep of sunset crawl across the sky as they catch their breaths. Dark blue night sweeps in close behind, the stars beginning to speckle across the horizon unhindered by city lights.

“He’s my brother,” Nate mutters suddenly, despite Sully losing quite thoroughly. 

Nate sighs long and deep, as if the admission has forced the specter of Sam out from where it had been lodged in his chest, “He’s getting out of prison next month.”

Sully lets the impromptu confession float into the cold air above them. In a way, he already knew Sam was something like this, but what really surprises him is that his immediate response is to help Nate out however he can, even if it means extending this goodwill to a complete stranger. As long as they are someone Nate obviously loves.

“Where?” Sully is ready to offer his plane and his money, but the next thought raises his eyebrows, “Don’t tell me he’s in a Colombian prison.”

Nate laughs again, sitting up, “And if I said yes?”

 _I'd say your poor luck must be genetic_ , Sully thinks, but the exasperation is tinged with fondness.

Instead, Sully hums in affirmation. It goes without saying that once they are done here, they’ll be heading back together.

—

“Well, I’m goddamn freezing,” Sully finally grouses, grumbling a bit as he lifts himself out of the snow, brushing away where it clings on the back of his pants. He turns and extends a hand to Nate, startled to see him again peering directly at him, after the few weeks of being an outlier of his attention. He barely notices Nate take his hand.

As they trudge back towards the cabin, Nate breaks their silence, “I know how to shoot a pistol.”

Sully shrugs, “Don’t doubt you — ”

“Can you teach me how to use the hunting rifle, instead?” Nate continues, “There’s one in the storage shed.”

“Sure, I – “

Nate cuts him off again, talking up a storm as if to make up for his earlier reticence, “Awesome! Can we hunt deer? I’ve never hunted before! I want to wear a coonskin cap. Let’s make some venison jerky!”

Sully opens the door to the cabin, placing a large hand at the small of the boy’s back and giving him a strong push back inside the warm room, “Tomorrow, kiddo. Tomorrow!”


End file.
